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And (Jesus) was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white.

Mark 9:2-3

I have a useless party trick that I occasionally bust out when the time is right: I can spin a basketball on my finger.  It makes me feel pretty cool until I see actually talented people.  I recently saw a video of a street performer who did his routine at a stoplight. When the cars were stopped, he strung up a wire between the posts, climbed it, balanced himself on one foot and then proceeded to juggle pins, spin a ball on a stick between his teeth while whirling around a disk on his free foot (and gets down all before the light turns green again). Some people are just showoffs. 

I don’t often think of Jesus as a “showoff” but the Transfiguration might be the one exception.  Jesus goes up to the Mountaintop with Peter, James and John and suddenly his clothes become a “dazzling white.”  Usually, there is some practical purpose to miracles in the Gospels: a leper is cured, people are fed, a threatening storm is calmed. But here on the mountaintop, there is only one purpose to Jesus’ transfiguration: to dazzle. 

The Transfiguration’s one and only purpose seems to be to inspire awe.  It should make your jaw drop.  It should make you make you ask, “What is going on here?” It should make you wonder, “Who else could this be, if not the Messiah?” In that way, it actually answers the question Jesus poses to Peter not long before this, “Who do you say that I am?” 

Peter answers correctly, “You are the Messiah” but he doesn’t actually have an idea of what that might mean.  Jesus explains that the “Son of Man must undergo great suffering … be rejected … killed … and rise again” (an answer that Peter rejects off the bat). 

But all that will come later in the story.  First, they need to understand who Jesus is.  The Transfiguration demonstrates that very thing, so in that sense it serves a theological purpose, even if it doesn’t serve a practical one.  It announces that Jesus isn’t Moses or Elijah returned (as some people assumed) but that he was someone new.  He was not the Messiah they were expecting, but is in fact greater than their expectations. 

On this final Sunday before we jump into Lent, maybe you can find yourself dazzled by Jesus just as Peter, James and John were, and wonder, “Who else could this be, if not the Messiah?”